Comparing the resource requirements between Mastodon and GoToSocial has always been mind-boggling for me. It's just a complete night and day difference.
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
On the left, Island One (GoToSocial's) 1GB of RAM usage over the past 14 days.
On the right, Oliphant.Social (Mastodon/Glitch) 8GB of RAM usage over the past 14 days.
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
Like it's not an exaggeration or hyperbole, GTS is much cheaper to host. 1GB of RAM, 1 CPU, and 20Gb of hard drive is all you need.
You don't even need external storage (S3/Wasabi).
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
Speaking of external storage, if you run a mastodon server, you'll be doing this a lot:
And god help you if you ever get behind on running this or if it fails, because by the time you get around to fixing the issue and trying to wrangle the massive amounts of cache that has been building up over time, you'll spend days trying to run a script like this to stop paying Wasabi for 1 TB of data.
Yes, this task has been running since August 29.
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@oliphant I am not running the latest GtS -- you still need an external front-end client, right?
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
One other fun thing I discovered....
You can try to run a Mastodon server with 1 CPU and 1 GB of RAM, and maybe you'll get it to halfway work.
Then when it comes time to precompile the assets you'll brick your server as it uses up all of the CPU available.
When I did that with a test server, I had to disable the mastodon service and keep it from running so that precompile assets would finish.
Meanwhile, GTS doesn't bundle much of a frontend, so that's just not an issue.
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@holsta Correct.
I wrote a post about this on Island One to help with this transition. I recommend Phanpy.
https://uno.1sland.social/@admin/statuses/01J4K0C5AT27N731YCFZDVRQ01
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@oliphant ran into this with 2 GB RAM on our test instance. Had to enable swap and my patience.
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Steve Dinnreplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
@oliphant I don't think this is a fair comparison. I agree that GTS is probably more RAM-efficient, but (correct me if I'm wrong) your GTS instance is part of an archipelago and not the fediverse at large like your Mastodon. It's not dealing with even close to the regular amount of connections that a full-fediverse-connected server would be.
Compare these two instances' federated feeds.
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@mick Oh yeah, enabling swap. That was something I did early on before breaking down and saying "fuck it, 8GB of RAM here we go."
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@oliphant How does GTS stack up on features compared to Mastodon nowadays?
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Steve Dinn last edited by [email protected]
@steve This is true, followers and interactions and overall traffic are not equal. I have a separate test GTS server that is in regular blocklist mode and it's been active for months. I don't have anywhere near the followers there or normal interaction, though it's still ingesting traffic from those I follow.
The stats on that server aren't much different (screenshots)
Note that GTS very much explicitly explains that 1 CPU and 1 GB of RAM and when it comes to HD, 15-20GB of HD space are sufficient for a few years.
https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/getting_started/#server-vps-system-requirements
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@sef I talk about that a little bit here. The most important thing to note is that GTS implements the Mastodon API, so many apps that work with Mastodon already work with GTS.
And that's allowed GTS to skip, entirely, the need to spend dev time or debugging on a frontend UI. Their recommendation is to use Semaphore (on the web), Tusky (android), or Feditext (iOS).
I, personally, recommend using Phanpy both for Mastodon and for GTS, as you can switch between them and it gives a more consistent experience (plus it's really nice.) And it works fine on mobile, too. It's responsive.
Quickly offhand, there's just a couple big things missing from GTS I can think of:
- Ability to edit posts
- Can't follow hashtags
- Like Glitch, I wish it had 'Local-Only' posts enabled, though I'm unsure of what UI exists that supports that, anyway.
By contrast, it has a few things Mastodon doesn't, which I consider big features.
- It's actually addressed the I don't see all the replies problem.
- Unlisted posts aren't web accessible or a part of the RSS feed and you actually have to opt-in to the RSS feed, it's not enabled by default.
- Authorized Fetch enabled by default, there's no turning it off
- 5000 characters per post by default, configurable
- With a Phanpy UI, you can do GIF posts and it has built-in 'quote post' (previewing the post) built-in, along with language translation, though this isn't a GTS thing (this works with Mastodon, too), it makes the "lack of a UI" with GTS more of a non-issue.
There might be a few things I'm forgetting, but that's just off the top of my head.